me hate the box the more."

"I will take it out of your way at once. I may want it. It should
be with the others. I know it as well as I know my snuff-box. It was
Aberthaw who put it in that corner; but I had forgotten that it was
lettered. The others are all numbered."

Of course Mr. Jellicorse was not weak enough to make the partner of his
bosom the partner of his business; and much as she longed to know why
he had put an unusual question to her, she trusted to the future for
discovery of that point. She left him, and he with no undue haste--for
the business, after all, was not his own--began to follow out his train
of thought, in manner much as follows:

"This is that old Duncombe's writing--'Dunder-headed Duncombe,' as he
used to be called in his lifetime, but 'Long-headed Duncombe' afterward.
None but his wife knew whether he was a wise man, or a wiseacre. Perhaps
either, according to the treatment he received. Richard Yordas treated
him badly; that may have made him wiser. V. b. c. means 'vide box C,'
unless I am greatly mistaken. He wrote those letters as plainly and
clearly as he could against this power of appointment as recited here.
But afterward, with knife and pounce, he scraped them out, as now
becomes plain with this magnifying-glass; probably he did so when all
these archives, as he used to call them, were rudely ordered over to my
predecessor. A nice bit of revenge, if my suspicions are correct; and a
pretty confusion will follow it."

The lawyer's suspicions proved too correct. He took that box to his
private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell
came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers
of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to
the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when
he began to die; skins much older than any man's who handled them, and
drier than the brains of any lawyer.

"Anno Jacobi tertio, and Quadragesimo Elisabethae! How nice it sounds!"
Mr. Jellicorse exclaimed; "they ought all to go in, and be charged for.
People to be satisfied with sixty years' title! Why, bless the Lord,
I am sixty-eight myself, and could buy and sell the grammar school at
eight years old. It is no security, no security at all. What did the
learned Bacupiston say--'If a rogue only lives to be a hundred and
eleven, he may have been for ninety years disseized, and nobody alive to
know it!'"

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